Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016
on July 15, 2024, 7:24 pm
The system is built on violence and no one is going to change that
Jul 15, 2024
All political violence is wrong.
The problem with that statement is that although almost everyone will say they agree, few actually do. Most people agree with political violence against people with opinions they dislike. This is a sad fact of life and it’s a sentiment few will admit to.
I happen to believe violence should only be the very last resort and what happened to Donald Trump was wrong, but I’m not going to shed crocodile tears over the attempted assassination. I’m not going to get emotional about a terrible human being getting a cut on his ear. I do not feel sorry for Donald Trump, but I do feel sorry for the firefighter who lost his life and I feel sorry for his family. I also feel sorry for the American people who have found themselves in an almighty mess.
We need to put a stop to political violence, but this won’t happen if we accept the nonsense coming from politicians about this being the fault of social media and other ridiculous arguments.
Putting a stop to political violence means putting a stop to all political violence, including the violence meted out by US presidents. If we’re going to condemn violence towards our politicians, we need to also condemn the violence perpetrated by them.
Politicians want it both ways: if you call out their violence, they accuse you of putting them at risk of violence! What they are demanding is lack of accountability. In the eyes of a politician, the only violence that counts is the violence coming their way.
The idea of US democracy is a joke at this point - a failure of checks and balances has packed Washington with dangerous individuals who do not represent their constituents and just line their own pockets. When your checks and balances fail to protect the public, there is going to be a reaction.
At present, it’s too early to say what the motives of the shooter were, but politicians in the UK agree the British public, who had nothing to do with this shooting, need more censorship and authoritarian control! Yes, we, who are on the other side of the Atlantic, must be punished for the actions of this gunman. You couldn’t make it up.
By all accounts, the shooter was another disaffected young man who was bullied at school, and while many in the US were quick to blame the “radical left”, this was apparently another shooter with right-wing views. Why is this relevant? Because the right wing has pushed the message for years that guns are necessary to stop tyrannical governments - and both Republicans and Democrats constantly insist the other side will be tyrannical in power. The thing is, they’re not entirely wrong!
Biden is currently an active participant in a genocide and Trump’s only criticism is Biden has not gone far enough. Whoever the US elects in November, one thing that is on offer is more bloodshed. Both men will continue to fail to meet the material needs of the working class and will continue to fund wars. The US middle class is collapsing and people are in disarray as their leaders abandon them. The wrong type of person always ends up in power, and while you can scream from the rooftops they were democratically elected, the reality is US elections are bought by those with the deepest pockets.
In Donald Trump, you truly have one of the most despicable human beings in politics. I’m not saying this to encourage violence against him, I’m saying it to explain that when such people are in power they become a magnet to violence. The best solution is to not put such people in power.
Trump has encouraged his security to beat up peaceful protesters at his rallies and steal their property. He has praised the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse, and even praised Hannibal Lecter at a rally, and yes, that was a joke (I think), but what a weird joke. He has called white supremacists very fine people and backed the Proud Boys. He boasts that he could shoot someone and not lose any supporters.
The behaviour of Trump, and other presidents, places violence at the forefront of the American mindset. When your country is built around violence and your personal image is built around being a “strong man”, you are creating a reality where violence can come for anyone, including you.
Trump should not have been shot, but nor should he be standing for president. We’re talking about a man who has boasted of groping women and walking into the changing rooms of underage girls when they were undressing. We’re talking about a man who was found to be a rapist in a court and has many credible allegations of rape and sexual assault against him. You can cry all you want that the deep state uses sex crime allegations to bring people down, but everything about Trump screams rapist. This is a man you would not want to babysit your kids, but he ended up in charge of a country and could become president again. Just look at how he felt it was okay to treat refugee children at the Mexican border, and yes, I know Biden was also awful on this issue. I’m not trying to turn this into a Republican versus Democrat thing. They’re all terrible people. Have they considered not being terrible people?
Here’s the biggest of ironies: the man who just survived an assassination attempt is guilty of ordering an assassination himself. Trump ordered the killing of an Iranian general and I don’t care about your opinions of Iran because that general had a lower body count than any US general. As much as I despise the war machine, I do not want US generals to be assassinated either! I want peaceful solutions to our problems.
The reality is violence begets violence.
The US system is built on violence because violence goes hand in hand with corruption. It is how you keep corruption going.
Democrats suddenly cared when a man who is just like them became the target, but if the target was Nicolas Maduro, they wouldn’t even blink. Hell, they would applaud the shooter and tell the world this is what Venezuela wants. Chances are the CIA would have trained the assassin. You see the difference? Political violence is considered fine when it’s against foreigners and poor people.
The US is a country where life is cheap, where a police officer can shoot you dead because he is feeling nervous, where politicians will blow up schools and hospitals to get the people they consider bad guys, where their own citizens pay for an exorbitant miliary budget and are left to die when they get sick, where people are executed at one of the highest rates in the world. The US empire does not value human life. Shit, the CIA assassinated Martin Luther King jr and President Kennedy and was never held to account. Don’t even get me started on all the foreign leaders they’ve killed.
The US needs a truly democratic system in which politicians cannot be bought, the CIA cannot act extrajudicially, and the Supreme Court cannot rule the president is above the law. It needs to end the American idea of pitting citizens against each other in a system of rugged individualism. It needs to dismantle the war machine and the grotesque manifestations of capitalism like big pharma. It needs to create a system that values human life. In such a system, the risk of violence will fall dramatically, but if you continue with a system in which each presidential candidate tells the public the other is a danger to society, and neither is actually wrong, the threat of violence will always remain.
The last working-class hero in England.
Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018
Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
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